Background

The Oil & Gas (O&G) industry produces a staggering amount of new
data every day from a variety of activities such as drilling, exploration and
production, reservoir management, major capital projects, facility and
downstream operations. The problem of information explosion and overload
presents an ever increasing challenge in finding and analyzing information
quickly and precisely in order to get the most value for the business. This
problem is not unique to the O&G industry; much the same can be said, for
example, about the Health Care and Life Science (HCLS) industry, which has
embraced Semantic Web technology in
order to unite many forms of biological and medical information across diverse
industries and institutions through the encoding of meaning into the data and
their interpretations. The fundamental question is how Semantic Web
technologies might play a similar role in the further development of energy
resources. To explore this, W3C hosts workshops with specific focus on industry
areas to discuss what directions and methodologies each industry should take
and how to achieve maximum benefit. The first of these workshops focusses on
the Oil and Gas industry. From these workshops, the creation of one or more W3C
Interest or Working groups will be explored as a possible way to move forward.

Goal of Workshop

The high level goal of this workshop is to gather and share possible use
cases and/or case studies for Semantic Web in the O&G industry in order to
understand the business drivers and benefits of using Semantic Web in that
particular area of industry. The Workshop should also explore whether it is
worthwhile to consider the creation of an Interest or Working Group under the
auspices of W3C, and whether the workshop participants will have gathered
enough information for their companies to decide whether to commit substantial
resources to such an effort.

To this end, Workshop participants will:

Discuss current business issues around connecting information from highly
diverse sources;

Consider how automated inference might help to solve particular business
problems;

Present use cases for Semantic Web technologies and standards as used or
explored in this industry branch;

Share current experience with using Semantic Web technologies and
standards;

Identify current taxonomies or ontologies that could support Semantic Web
implementations in the O&G industry;

Discuss the potential pragmatic impact of Semantic Web for O&G;

Identify low hanging fruit

Prioritize potential areas of application

Identify key target audiences and their needs. For instance:

End users (operations, management, R&D)

Business partners (suppliers, contractors, operators)

IT (architects, analysts, developers)

Outline the possible roles for W3C, for participating companies and
organizations, and identify next steps

Scope of Workshop

The Workshop will focus on these four areas:

Use cases for O&G industry

Case studies and implementation experiences in O&G

Pragmatic impact of Semantic Web technologies and standards for O&G

Business cases

Audience

W3C encourages people interested in the topics list in the goal and scope
sections to participate in the Workshop.

Requirements for Participation

There is no participation fee, but registration is required. Registration
instructions will be sent to submitters of position papers.

W3C membership is not required in order to participate in the Workshop.

Each participant must submit (or be co-submitter of) a position paper.

The total number of participants will be limited. To ensure diversity, a
limit may be imposed on the maximum number of participants per
organization.

Position Papers

Position papers are the basis for the discussion at the Workshop. Position
papers must be submitted no later than 30 September 2008. These papers will
also be made available to the public (see also published position papers from
previous W3C workshops).
Submitting a paper constitutes recognition of the terms of this Call for
Participation about publication of the position paper. Late submission of
position papers may be accepted depending on space availability. Any accepted
late submission won't be considered for the workshop program.

Position papers must be submitted via email to team-ogws@w3.org,
an archived mailing list accessible to the W3C staff. Note that the system
might ask you (via reply email) to confirm your submission. Don't hesitate to
contact Ivan Herman (ivan@w3.org)
before 30 September if you think your submission got lost.

The Program Committee may ask the authors of particularly
salient position papers to explicitly present their position at the Workshop.
Presenters will be asked to make the slides of any presentations available to
the public in HTML, PDF, or plain text.

Format

All papers should be 1 to 5 pages, although they may link to longer versions
or appendixes. They must be in English. Allowed formats are HTML/XHTML, PDF, or
plain text.